The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome Jonathan Beri, founder of Golioth!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics, who are discussing RISC-V. Check out their page on resources about RISC-V and how you can purchase kits that include chips using the open source ISA and learn more about how they can benefit your project.

• What makes IoT so hard? “It’s a system of systems”
• Commercial off the shelf (COTS) systems are whitelabeled hardware with custom firmware/software
• We use a brief example of a forest fire sensor using the ABC board
• Firmware and security models
• AWS IoT vs Azure IoT platforms
• Implications of choosing a cloud provider
• Jon has a background in hardware
• He started at Google working on Firebase. Later they attempted a “Firebase for Arduino” that did not pan out.
• He then joined Nest shortly after the Google acquisition, working on the communications.
• Procurement and planning was interesting for Nest, especially because they added sensors that weren’t available to the user / firmware right away.
• Thread is a protocol that creates mesh network on a wide range of radios
• Every device can talk to one another
• It uses 2.4 GHz and is built on top of 802.15.4
• How do thread devices get back to the internet?
• OpenThread runs on nrf52840
• Tutorial on OpenThread
• After Nest, Jon went to Particle and worked on embedded
• OpenThread based
• There were lots of adventures with early Cat-M1 on the Ublox R410B
• Particle bought RedBear, a Chinese startup with a lot of RF knowledge
• Hardware is designed by Mohit Bhoite, who has been on Embedded.fm and also is a circuit sculpture master
• Jon’s last job was at WeWork (RIP?)
• He wanted to learn more on the cloud side of things.
• There were a number of WeWork sites spread out over 600 buildings. Each of these has a physical security need (door locks, turnstiles, etc)
• The challenge is that his team didn’t own or have the ability to change the hardware
• Wanted to build the experience
• Proxy (startup)
• Going towards solving some of these problems
• Physical constraints
• ABC board
• Vertically integrated embedded platform
• Particle B523
• Hardware matters
• Android Things, now depricated
• Building scooters
• Nest door lock with Yale
• FreeRTOS with AWS
• Who do you hire to do the “in-between” hardware and the web?
• Reasons IoT products fail
• IT cares about setup, managing it, integrating into business process
• Enterprise cnversations and managing devices
• Fleet management
• Fleet stuff is normally for the business person
• Golioth
• Jon wrote about CoAP and how it works
• Chris wishes there is a site like BuiltWith…but for IoT devices
• Protocols are an arbitrage opportunity
• Internet is now standard part of RTOSes
  • Mongoose
  • Contiki
  • Riot OS
  • NuttX
• HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers) or PALs (Platform Abstraction Layers)
• “Where’s the porting guide vs where’s the hello world”
• Find Jon on
  • Twitter
  • Zephyr slack
  • The Interrupt (associated blog)
• Sign up for more info about the upcoming platform on Golioth.io
• More info about Jon’s stealth mode startup on Stacey on IoT

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring today’s show as well!